Thursday, 7 November 2013

Since the Stone Age or even before, the ability to share
knowledge and information has been fundamental to the development of the human
race. Just think of how expertise in making flints, then metal tools, pottery,
paper and glass revolutionized our life-style as it spread round the globe! And
think how the opportunities for exploiting information are now even greater.
CILIP has an enviable UK-wide remit to serve our profession across the whole range
of information management specialisms. So why, in the information age, is its
membership contracting?

For months, activists Martin White and Sandra Ward have been
pointing to the needs of business and society, and urging CILIP to grasp the
opportunities. Last week their efforts culminated in an Information Management Summit: Towards transforming organisations and
our profession. Anne Mauger, CILIP’s Chief Executive, showed clear support
for their initiative.

The proceedings

A parade of first-class speakers presented nine different
perspectives, starting with a sparkling keynote address from Clive Holtham,
Professor of Information Management at City University. (See slides from most speakers,
on the Summit
site.) Unsurprisingly, the invited
audience of about 40 senior information professionals responded
enthusiastically. Kate Arnold, President-elect of the Special Libraries
Association, invited all to download a report on The
evolving value of information management and the five essential attributes of the modern information
professional, commissioned by the Financial Times in conjunction with the
SLA. Among other heady stuff the report stresses the importance of
“decision-ready information” and invites “an urgent response from information
professionals that clearly demonstrates their value to organizations”.

Speaking for CILIP, Annie Mauger promised commitment to
supporting its practitioner members in this field. CILIP could not claim to
cover every aspect of IM, she felt, nor to be IM’s only voice in the
professional society space. But there would certainly be support for the IM
Project Board which the organizers are bent on establishing. As follow-up, an
open meeting will be held at Ridgmount St on 2nd December. The Board wants to
support CILIP members and their organizations in improving IM practice; one
component will be to develop and share tools and position papers that IM
practitioners can use to influence progress in the workplace. We're all invited to contribute to the Project and make use of the outcomes.

And how does all this bear on Knowledge Organization (KO)?

KO and IM practitioners face many of the same challenges. KO
lies at the heart of information management, providing the theoretical
underpinning for many IM techniques. As Liane Kordan pointed out in her talk
about self-development from librarian to information management consultant, “Some
things remain the same…. there’s just more information in different formats and
various places. But we still need to classify, with a good understanding of
customer needs”.

KO, a field that was founded on the study of classification,
is a key thread in the weave of information management. In the picture below,
which illustrates how the Institute of Information Scientists and the Library
Association merged to form CILIP and carry forward the still evolving IM
agenda, KO is the most basic thread originally shared by the IIS and the LA.

Members of CILIP and of ISKO (International Society for
Knowledge Organization) both find their skills and contribution are little
known and undervalued – even though KO techniques have applications all around
us. If society and the economy are to benefit, we all need to maintain our own
self-development and get our voices more confidently heard at top management level.
ISKO UK will continue its programme of events to help members share their experiences
and learn from others. Its collaboration will continue with UKeiG, IRSG, CILIP,
SLA and other bodies interested in information management. News from the IM
Project Board will be welcome grist for the mill.

Wednesday, 6 November 2013

I had no idea that Paul Otlet, co-inventor of UDC, was also instrumental in bringing the 5x3 index card to the world. Or that he was an early thinker about levels of granularity within the content of a book, and how you should be able to arrange and re-arrange those contents as required (what would he have made of the term 'information architecture'?). Boyd Rayward's keynote address to the International UDC Seminar on Classification and Visualisation was full of fascinating facts about Otlet and his vision for a World City which would contain a total centralization of all international power and knowledge in one place, in the interests of progress and peace. It's extraordinary to think of Otlet and his colleague Henri La Fontaine putting together their universal bibliography which grew to over 15 million entries, and using it to answer queries from around the world, like a human Google.
There were plenty of other interesting discussions about ways to represent knowledge, but possibly too few actual examples. There were two obvious and very different exceptions to this: Scott Weingart spoke about very early visualisations which most often used the metaphor of a branching tree of knowledge, a tree which over time became very complicated and hard to interpret as knowledge expanded. Scott's accompanying illustrations were lovely. At the other end of the time spectrum, we had Lev Manovich's presentation, abounding with images and video, which showed how computational analysis and visualisation of large data sets can provide some fascinating insights into how an artist's style develops or how the design of magazine cover moves with the times. His video on analysis of Rothko paintings (available at http://manovich.net/research.php ) was fascinating and beautiful to look at.
Over the two days we were treated to many more wonderful images and thoughtful presentations: see particularly http://knowescape.org/ for beautiful colours and www.vizgr.org/sere<http://www.vizgr.org/sere> for an interesting method of relating concepts in a visual and informative way. The Conference was very well attended - I counted over 100 people, from upwards of 10 countries. This all comes at a time when several of our clients have been asking for more visual representations of taxonomy and other information architecture artefacts, so it was good food for thought. Just never show me another tag cloud.
Judi Vernau, Metataxis Ltd